The next day, October 1, was no less delightful: mild, still, and cloudless; so that it was pleasant to lounge upon the piazza in the early morning, looking at Lafayette,—good business of itself,—and listening to the warble of a bluebird, the soft chirps of myrtle warblers, or the distant gobbling of a turkey down at one of the river farms; while now and then a farmer drove past from his morning errand at the creamery, with one or two tall milk-cans standing behind him in the open, one-seated carriage. If you see a man on foot as far from the village as this, you may set him down, in ornithological language, as a summer resident or a transient visitor. Franconians, to the manner born, are otherwise minded, and will “hitch up” for a quarter of a mile. As good John Bunyan said, “This is a valley that nobody walks in, but those that love a pilgrim’s life.”
As I take the Notch road after breakfast the temperature is summer-like, and the foliage, I think, must have reached its brightest. Above the Profile House farm, on the edge of the golf links, where the whole Franconia Valley lies exposed, I seat myself on the wall, inside a natural hedge that borders the highway, to admire the scene: a long verdant meadow, flanked by low hills covered, mile after mile, with vivid reds and yellows; splendor beyond words; a pageant glorious to behold, but happily of brief duration. Human senses would weary of it, though the eye loves color as the palate loves spices and sweets, or, by force of looking at it, would lose all delicacy of perception and taste.
Even yet the world, viewed in broad spaces, wears a clean, fresh aspect; but near at hand the herbage and shrubbery are all in the sere and yellow leaf. So I am saying to myself when I start at the sound of a Hudsonian chickadee’s nasal voice speaking straight into my ear. The saucy chit has dropped into the low poplar sapling over my head, and surprised at what he discovers underneath, lets fall a hasty Sick-a-day-day. His dress, like his voice, compares unfavorably with that of his cousin, our familiar black-cap. In fact, I might say of him, with his dirty brown headdress, what I was thinking of the roadside vegetation: he looks dingy, out of condition, frayed, discolored, belated, frost-bitten. But I am delighted to see him,—for the first time at any such level as this,—and thank my stars that I sat down to rest and cool off on this hard but convenient boulder.
A chipmunk thinks I have sat here long enough, and feels no bashfulness about telling me so. Why should he? Frankness is esteemed a point of good manners in all natural society. A man shoots down the hill behind me on a bicycle, coasting like the wind, and another, driving up, salutes him by name, and then turns to cry after him in a ringing voice, “How be ye?” The emphatic verb bespeaks a real solicitude on the questioner’s part; but he is half a mile too late; he might as well have shouted to the man in the moon. Presently two men in a buggy come up the road, talking in breezy up-country fashion about some one whose name they use freely,—a name well known hereabout,—and with whom they appear to have business relations. “He got up this morning like a —— —— thousand of brick,” one of them says. A disagreeable person to work for, I should suppose. And all the while a child behind the hedge is taking notes. Queer things we could print, if it were allowable to report verbatim.
When this free-spoken pair is far enough in the lead, I go back to the road again, traveling slowly and keeping to the shady side, with my coat on my arm. As the climb grows steeper the weather grows more and more like August; and hark! a cicada is shrilling in one of the forest trees,—a long-drawn, heat-laden, midsummer cry. I will tell the entomologist about it, I promise myself. The circumstance must be very unusual, and cannot fail to interest her. (But she takes it as a matter of course. It is hard to bring news to a specialist.)
So I go on, up Hardscrabble and Little Hardscrabble, stopping like a short-winded horse at every water-bar, and thankful for every bird-note that calls me to a halt between times. An ornithological preoccupation is a capital resource when the road is getting the better of you. The brook likewise must be minded, and some of the more memorable of the wayside trees. A mountain road has one decided and inalienable advantage, I remark inwardly: the most perversely opinionated highway surveyor in the world cannot straighten it. How fast the leaves are falling, though the air scarcely stirs among them! In some places I walk through a real shower of gold. Theirs is an easy death. And how many times I have been up and down this road! Summer and autumn I have traveled it. And in what pleasant company! Now I am alone; but then, the solitude itself is an excellent companionship. We are having a pretty good time of it, I think,—the trees, the brook, the winding road, the yellow birch leaves, and the human pilgrim, who feels himself one with them all. I hope they would not disown a poor relation.
It is ten o’clock. Slowly as I have come, not a wagonload of tourists has caught up with me; and at the Bald Mountain path I leave the highway, having a sudden notion to go to Echo Lake by the way of Artist’s Bluff, so called, a rocky cliff that rises abruptly from the lower end of the lake. The trail conducts me through a veritable fernery, one long slope being thickly set with perfectly fresh shield-ferns,—Aspidium spinulosum and perhaps A. dilatatum, though I do not concern myself to be sure of it. From the bluff the lake is at my feet, but what mostly fills my eye is the woods on the lower side of Mount Cannon. There is no language to express the kind of pleasure I take in them: so soft, so bright, so various in their hues,—dark green, light green, russet, yellow, red,—all drowned in sunshine, yet veiled perceptibly with haze even at this slight distance. If there is anything in nature more exquisitely, ravishingly beautiful than an old mountainside forest looked at from above, I do not know where to find it.
Down at the lakeside there is beauty of another kind: the level blue water, the clean gray shallows about its margin, the reflections of bright mountains—Eagle Cliff and Mount Cannon—in its face, and soaring into the sky, on either side and in front, the mountains themselves. And how softly the ground is matted under the shrubbery and trees: twin-flower, partridge berry, creeping snowberry, goldthread, oxalis, dwarf cornel, checkerberry, trailing arbutus! The very names ought to be a means of grace to the pen that writes them.
White-throats and a single winter wren scold at me behind my back as I sit on a spruce log, but for some reason there are few birds here to-day. The fact is exceptional. As a rule, I have found the bushes populous, and once, I remember, not many days later than this, there were fox sparrows with the rest. I am hoping some time to find a stray phalarope swimming in the lake. That would be a sight worth seeing. The lake itself is always here, at any rate, especially now that the summer people are gone; and if the wind is right and the sun out, so that a man can sit still with comfort (to-day my coat is superfluous), the absence of other things does not greatly matter.
This clean waterside must have many four-footed visitors, particularly in the twilight and after dark. Deer and bears are common inhabitants of the mountain woods; but for my eyes there is nothing but squirrels, with once in a long while a piece of wilder game. Twice only, in Franconia, have I come within sight of a fox. Once I was alone, in the wood-road to Sinclair’s Mills. I rounded a curve, and there the fellow stood in the middle of the way, smelling at something in the rut. After a bit (my glass had covered him instantly) he raised his head and looked down the road in a direction opposite to mine. Then he turned, saw me, started slightly, stood quite still for a fraction of a minute (I wondered why), and vanished in the woods, his white brush waving me farewell. He was gone so instantaneously that it was hard to believe he had really been there.